[Ansteorra] Electronic publishing

[Sluggy]

Karie Mitchell wrote:

> >One that I personally favor is unbundling the membership from the
> > >newsletters.  This would entail only one class of member (instead of >the
> >three we have now) and making the Kingdom newsletter, TI, and all >other
> >publications subscription based.
>
> That does sound like a reasonable idea.

I agree that separating the BlackStar subscription from membership would be a
great way to solve the problem, especially for the long term. This would allow
the actual cost of the newsletter to be recovered without depending on
fundraising. I suspect, however, that SCA corporate might be resistant to such a
change because the other kingdoms don't seem to have this problem. It would be
interesting to find out if other kingdom newsletters are indeed facing similar
shortfalls and if so, what their solutions have been.

> I am also interested in learning if we could go to an electronic copy of the
> Kingdom newsletter.  I don't know what problems there would be with such a
> thing, but it seems that it would help with the postage and printing issues
> we are having now.  If those of us who have more knowledge about such
> matters would help the discussion of an "e-newsletter" to help those of us
> who are not as "literate" I think a few of us would be very grateful.

As the Chronicler of Loch Ruadh, pretty much all things printed in Loch Ruadh
have fallen to me. We have occasionally used PDF files to facilitate email
approval of the layout of such things as the ads for last year's Lughnasad,
various handouts and other such documents. This was partly because of the size
of Microsoft Publisher files, but mostly because not everyone involved had
Publisher but almost everyone who a) uses their computer online a lot or b)
bought their computer in the last, oh, 2 years or so, most likely has Adobe
Acrobat Reader installed. If not, it's a free and reasonable download (6.5MB,
about 20 minutes at 33.6K) ) by today's standards. There is even a PalmOS
version of the reader software.

Even if a reasonable majority of internet capable PCs have an Acrobat reader
installed, the electronic distribution would not be for everyone and I would
never advocate that the BlackStar be published electronically only. There are
several valid reasons why the paper copies need to remain today and for the
foreseeable future.

That being said, I must also explain that there are a few caveats to using Adobe
to publish a complete newsletter. Most importantly is that publishing the same
document to PDF or to printer often changes the layout in small but sometimes
important ways. It depends on the specifics of the document. I experimented with
putting The Scarlet Letter in PDF format and the biggest layout problem I
experienced was the calendar grid. This can be alleviated with careful design of
the document, or maintaining two copies of each issue, but I think that's a lot
to ask of the volunteers who publish the Blackstar.

Another problem with the PDF format is more technical, dealing with the
compression and display of artwork covers and such. Being a bit of a resolution
purist, I found that the default graphic display options compromised too much of
the detail in the cover art for The Scarlet Letter. Changing the options
recovered the detail, but at a cost in filesize, making the file quite a bit
larger. This would result in a longer download time for modem users. In any
case, the PDF filesizes were typically only 5-10% of the Publisher files, often
15-20MB with a high resolution scan of a detailed drawing for the cover.

Even with these quite addressable problems, the real problem with an electronic
version will be the maintenance of the subscription list. Not only would there
need to actually be two subscription lists (one for each version of the
newsletter), an email list of paying subscribers is difficult to administer.
People are sometimes forced to change email addresses with little or no notice.
Email is easy to delete inadvertently and then how do to regulate the sending of
extra copies in such cases?

In short, an electronic version is not for everyone, but I suspect a number of
people would be quite willing to receive their newsletter electronically and
every person who did so would help alleviate the financial strain of printing
and mailing a physical newsletter.

Lord Robert of Slugglen, Chronicler Loch Ruadh
b.k.a. Sluggy!